How Jatayus have been helping Indian police fight terror

In his Ramlila speech in Lucknow early this week, PM Narendra Modi drew an analogy of a mythical bird, Jatayu, to drive home a point: Ordinary people must remain alert to terrorism and inform the police of any suspicious movement. In the Ramayana, it was the vulture-like Jatayu that informed Ram about Sita’s abduction by Ravana.
ET Magazine spoke to five police officers, both retired and serving, to get a sense of leads provided by ordinary men and women — the Jatayus — that help sleuths crack cases of terrorism, dacoity, drug trafficking and other such crimes, apart from pre-empting incidents. “Without the Jatayu on your side, you can’t win the battle against terrorism. You will lose if common people choose to be fence-sitters,” says Vikram Singh, former director general of police of Uttar Pradesh.

Vikram narrates how the government spent tens of crores of rupees over decades to catch dacoit Shiv Kumar Patel, known better as Dadua. Dadua unleashed terror in the 1980s and the ’90s in Chitrakoot in Uttar Pradesh and the adjoining areas in Madhya Pradesh.

Finally, the UP police changed its modus operandi and focused more on getting the help of people in about 500 villages in the area. They, including women, were taught how to use mobile phones, to get their handsets charged, as many of them did not have electricity at home, and send coded text messages. Eventually, Dadua was killed in an encounter in Chitrakoot in 2007 and, within a year, another dacoit, Thokia, was eliminated.




Eyes and Ears
Cut to a 2014 explosion in a two-storey building in Burdwan, West Bengal. A team led by SK Singh, then IG (investigation) at the National Investigation Agency (NIA), was shocked when he found that the residents on the ground floor of the building, which was also used as a Trinamool Congress local office, had no clue about the people staying upstairs. When a blast occurred on October 2 in which two men — Sakil Gazi and Sovan Mandal alias Karim Sheikh — were killed, two armed women prevented police from entering their apartment.

An investigation found that the tenants were linked to the terror outfit, Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh ( JBM), which had planned major terror attacks in the state. The apartment, used as a storehouse for explosives, had three men and two women.

“When we started investigating the case, we realised local people were suspicions about the behaviour of the new neighbours who remained aloof from the rest,” says Singh. He concedes that a better police-people mechanism might have prevented terrorists from living in disguise. At the end of the day, as Singh says, the leads provided by the ordinary people in the locality helped the NIA trace the sequence of events backwards. Early this week, the NIA took in custody five alleged JBM members in connection with the incident.

While the police force across the country holds awareness campaigns asking landlords, lodge owners, car and property dealers to follow certain guidelines, including submitting documents about customers, these are at times ignored, giving oxygen to terror modules. An advertisement issued by the Delhi Police explains how every rickshaw and cartpuller, taxi and auto driver, fruit vendor, telephone booth owner and cyber café operator, among others,has a role in fighting terrorism.

“Not all men and women sacrifice their lives like Jatayu, but I have always found good Samaritans who selflessly became the eyes and ears of the security forces,” says DR Karthikeyan, a former CBI director, adding that he could not have cracked crucial cases in his career as an IPS officer had he not received the support of ordinary citizens.

It’s not that common people are not alert about suspicious movements which may or may not be finally connected to terrorism. But what is lacking is an institutional mechanism to instil confidence in people that they won’t be subject to future harassment. As investigator SK Singh puts it, the need of the hour is to create an environment of “ease of providing information”. An eagle-eyed bird may well be worth two thugs (or more) in the bush.